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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 14th, 2023

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  • Ultimately being truly anonymous on the internet is pretty hard, and thus VPNs are mostly helpful for getting around region blocks for streaming services, not for obtaining more privacy.

    I disagree.

    There seems to constantly be two sides of the privacy discussion with public VPN options and they’re both wrong on their own. It’s correct that using a VPN on its own is not enough to keep you private online, fingerprinting being one example to why. However, not using a VPN but having no identifiable browser fingerprint doesn’t either, since your IP is still a fingerprint too.

    I like to give the following analogies:

    1. Doing only an oil change on your vehicle but no other maintenance won’t keep your vehicle running forever
    2. Doing all vehicle maintenances except oil changes won’t keep your vehicle running forever

    If the goal is to be private, remember that a VPN is only one tool in a very large tool belt.



  • Daily on my Gentoo server, through a Cronjob every morning. It’s a custom script though, so there’s more than just doing an emerge update. It’ll send me ntfy notifications for the update results, if there are new news items, and if there are any time config merge updates to make. A few other things as well but that’s the main stuff.

    Other servers, typically weekly or only manually when I ssh into them (for the ones I don’t really feel the need to update frequently).







  • As a professional, my reasoning for NOT using AI is as follows:

    1. I don’t want to lose the muscle memory of what I do. Sure AI might be able to do annoying things like test templates… But that’s not a skill I want to forget or lose, as self written unit tests have actually helped me catch mistakes that “would have worked” in prod (i.e. Code functions, but has undesired outcomes). AI can’t usually spot that.
    2. As a person who digs deep in cyber security and monitors heavily the malicious realm, I’m paranoid of malicious or weak code being spit into my repos.
    3. I’m a privacy nut, too. Most “good” AI solutions are anti privacy.
    4. If anyone here has done a proper code review of AI generated code from coworkers, they should know it adds a ton of extra time because of errors, inconsistencies with repo practices, etc and actually wastes the time of the developer and reviewers.

    Am I saying “NEVER AI?”? nah. But it’s far from ready for me personally to even consider for programming purposes. I’m also well aware this isn’t what many others think or feel; I don’t scream at people for using it if it’s what they feel helps them.





  • I’m honestly… In the middle.

    My home network is covered by a VPN, which means I can’t use streaming services without punching a hole for my home IP and sacrificing a little privacy - which I’m not willing to do. I’ve gone through my part and contacted providers to lemme through, without success. Even Amazon who CLEARLY knows my name and mailing address still won’t let me watch things even if I own Prime…

    So yes, I pirate movies and tv shows. I’ve tried to cooperate, but if my money isn’t enough, then so be it.

    Video games I no longer pirate, I’m content with Steam. I also backup all my installs on an external hard drive in the unlikely event Steam goes under or a company demands pulling a game from my profile.

    This is no longer true for Nintendo. Their latest attitudes have resulted in me deleting my account and becoming a loyal pirate for Nintendo games. They literally turned me into what they’re fighting, ironic right?

    I also no longer pirate general software because 98% of the software I use are FOSS, self created, or just free+offline in general. The other 2% is software I purchased because it was a lifetime permanent license and for software I felt deserved the money for support.

    So yeah big tech is my main enemy. If I need something and they won’t work with me without ransoming my privacy and rights, then yeah so be it.


  • I’m not familiar with those two… But I’ve always been hunting for the perfect replacement.

    I started with Nextcloud Deck and used it extensively until they got rid of my markdown support.

    So then I tried taiga and a few others before landing on Wekan. Really great software, but the terrible API, horrible mobile support, and slow outdated UI drove me away…

    Now I’m on Vikunja, which ironically doesn’t support markdown text. So I basically returned to square 1 with a better UI lol. I almost stayed on Wekan because of the checklist support, but the faster speeds, nice API, and slick UI in vikunja landed me here… for now.




  • My personal advice, secure it down to only permitting what needs it, regardless of your trust to the network.

    Treat each device as if they’ve been compromised and the attacker on the compromised device is now trying to move laterally. Example scenario: had you blocked all devices except your laptop or phone to your server, your server wouldn’t have been hacked because someone went through a hacked cloud-connected HVAC panel.

    I lock down everything and grant access only to devices that should have access. Then on top of that, I enable passwords and 2FA on everything as if it were public… Nothing I self host is public. It’s all behind my network firewall and router firewall, and can only be accessed externally by a VPN.



  • Yeah, in my example, I have various genres of music I listen to and some days I’m in the mood for one and not another. Some of those might have subgenres I am in the mood to listen to. For example: Metal might break into subfolders called black metal, thrash metal, melodic metal, etc. Based on where I feel they belong the most. If I’m in the mood for some melodic metal today, I’ll go there. Or EDM, I’ll have a folder for Psytrance, another for House, etc…

    Rather than trying to edit the metadata on thousands and thousands of files every time I change media systems as I’ve done over these years, it’s 100x simpler for me to just navigate to the folders directly and not care about how the system “wants” to organize it. Every media system wants to organize differently and I’m kind of tired of having to spend hours editing all my music just to get it to organize the way that works for me, so that’s where I’ve gotten to the point of just using folder structures.